Detecting when you are away

I used to make it really complicated but I’ve simplified a lot. We all have Android phones so we use the openHAB Android app’s feature where it will report the WiFi SSID the phone is connected to to an Item. If that Item matches my home WiFi name, that person is home.

If I wanted to be sneakier, I could use Tasker’s ability to report nearby WiFi SSID names and update an Item with that list. Is one of my home WiFi SSIDs are in the list, I’ll count that person home.

Geofencing is usually too slow and inaccurate.

Pinging the phone with the Network binding took too much fiddling (note, modern phones will randomize their MAC addresses and they go to sleep so you need to reconfigure the network settings to turn off random MAC addresses on the phone for hping to work).

Reporting the WiFi is accurate enough that I’ve not needed to go down the Bayesian route or the Wasp in the Box algorithm.

And I’ve no motion sensors at all but even if I did we couldn’t rely on them because of the dogs.

Sometimes simple can be good enough.

You might be interested in Generic Presence Detection if you want to add a little bit of a delay before marking someone as away. It can be implemented using the Debounce rule template so all you’ll need is some Item configuration.